[Greeks Only :P] Minoan Lines Wifi

September 12, 2010

So, only for Greeks, or people from other countries, who have travelled with Minoan Lines… :P

If you have ever travelled from Athens to Heraklion(or vice-versa :P) with a Minoan Lines ship, mabye you’ll notice that there’s a Wifi Hotspot, owned by Forthnet. If you try to use it, you’ll be presented with a Captive Portal.

In order to get access to the Internet, you have to pay some money(extremely overpriced, concidering the speed/bandwidth, although … you are in a ship :P).

I suppose Forthnet has many other hotspots, like this one, and I guess the prices are pretty much the same. Unless you are already a Forthnet customer(like I am). Then, you have free access.

But, even if you are a Forthnet customer, I think it’s fun! to find out if/how you can bypass this captive portal.

A month ago, I was travelling to Crete, so I tried some things, but everything phailed. :P

So, I googled a bit, and I found some interesting things.

Apparently, the best, if not the only, way to bypass the captive portal is DNS Tunneling.

However, the connection was awful, so SSHing to my server, and setting up the “customized” DNS server, was impossible.

So, I did all the preperations(DNS server modifications, etc…) while I was in Crete, and hoped I could test it when I’d travel back to Athens.

But, the Wifi Hotspot(specifically the Captive Portal “server” I think) was ‘down’, when I was travelling, so I couldn’t test DNS tunelling.

Maybe, next time.

Anyway, if anyone has tried it, let me know.

Although I think the bandwidth/speed will be terrible, considering the DNS tunelling overhead.

Btw, tricks like MAC/IP spoofing, ARP poisoning, hacking a poor Windoze unpatched user(etc etc), and setting up a NAT, are out of the question, since I wanted to ‘hack’ the hotspot/portal, and not the (l)users. :P